Embodiments described herein relate generally to systems and methods for compressing and extracting information from marketplace taxonomies. Different online marketplaces categorize items for sale using hierarchical category trees or taxonomies, which enable end users and/or consumers to more easily find items relevant to what they are browsing for. For a number of reasons such as product expansion, multiple parties managing, unintended duplication, historical reasons, bundling multiple sublevels together, automation, frequent changes, etc., taxonomies can quickly become overpopulated and confusing. In some instances, marketplaces might be composed of tens of thousands of categories, which make classification from a seller's perspective a nontrivial task.
Accordingly, a need exists for a system and method that can distill and/or compress the taxonomies of online marketplaces to a more manageable set of category items. Specifically, a need exists for a system and method that (1) allows merchants to focus on critical areas of taxonomies in classifying their items for sale; (2) allows merchants to stay current with the latest taxonomy changes published by marketplaces, and not have to reclassify their inventory with each change introduced by the marketplace; (3) enables an automated method to maintain inventory to marketplace synchronization; and/or (4) allows merchants to associate their inventory items with common attributes that apply across multiple marketplaces.